By Niall Cook
Worldwide Director of Marketing Technology
Hill & Knowlton

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

So begins The Cluetrain Manifesto, the book that first introduced the concept of markets as conversations. One of its key hypotheses was that the people who make up markets in the age of the Internet communicate with each other in a human voice, yet most companies only know how to speak with a corporate one. “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out to play?” they implored.

Fast-forward almost ten years and we find social media – blogs, wikis and the like – beginning to enable exactly these kinds of conversation, often without the knowledge of the communications department (see Employee-Generated Content: Look Who’s Talking. Like it or not, with social media every one of your employees is communicating with your market.

The same is true for internal communication. Despite the widespread increase of one-way communication channels, employees still prefer to get information about their organisation from their managers and each other. Broadcasting internal messages to staff is just as ineffective as broadcasting external messages to the market. There’s a conversation taking place between your employees too, but it’s not on your intranet.

Somewhat ironically it is the Internet – often regarded as an anti-social medium – that is driving this change. The vehicle for the movement is social software, an innovation designed to liberate, enable and encourage communication, creating opportunities for people to cooperate, collaborate and connect. You only need look at the over-inflated valuations of new online businesses such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Digg and Delicious to appreciate the attention social software is commanding.

This is not just a technological revolution but also a communications one, and the impact of social software on our industry will be profound. As communication becomes more social, its value increases exponentially as a result of being networked from the outset. The more people involved in the communication chain, the greater the value of social communication to those participants. As a result, more and more customers and communities will only want to do business with companies that listen to, learn from and utilize social communication. Employees will increasingly expect to be able to use the same participatory tools for communicating in their workplaces as they do for sharing pictures of their children with relatives or connecting with old colleagues and classmates.

As a result of this, the physical and conceptual boundaries between internal and external communication will crumble. The social communication tools of consumers will find their way into businesses and employees will use them to talk to people inside and outside the organization, often without their employer’s knowledge. This networked communication is giving employees power over corporate communication and reputation, and social software is making it happen. As a result the relationships both between employee and company and between each other are changing dramatically, reshaping their organizations – often from the bottom up.

In the foreword to my new book Enterprise 2.0, Don Tapscott argues that a new kind of enterprise is required that orchestrates resources, creates value and competes very differently from traditional firms, as well as driving changes in their industries. His research shows that those that understand these changes can gain rapid advantage and build sustainable businesses. By loosening hierarchies and giving more power to employees companies can expect faster innovation, improved customer response and more authenticity and respect in the marketplace.

For the communications director, there are therefore some new imperatives:

• They need to understand what social software is – what it looks like and why it works;
• They must evaluate how their employees are already using it to communicate, with each other and with the market;
• They should drive the business case for social communications, not IT;
• Ultimately they can move their communications culture from ‘command and control’ to ‘facilitate and frame’ to deliver the environment that employees and the market demand.

As the world gets flatter and even the smallest companies begin to compete on a global scale, social software provides the means for a new generation of employees to communicate with their customers and colleagues across geographical, functional and management boundaries.

And that can only be a good thing.

Niall Cook is Worldwide Director of Marketing Technology for Hill & Knowlton. His book, Enterprise 2.0, will be published in July 2008.

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